What am I doing on here? What is even life anymore? What is the whole point of any of this? Why are we thinking? Why are we feeling? Why are we listening? I don't think anybody even is doing any of that stuff. Everybody's brain is shut completely off. Are you even paying attention to anything that I'm saying right now? Are you paying attention to the world around you? Like, what the is going on? People really, truly are becoming too stupid for their own good.

Increasingly, the most unscrupulous and annoying and cringe and moronic dumbasses of the century are controlling the levers of power. And the dude who may in fact, end up running the Department of Health and Human Services is working on his second f, brain worm with a Big Mac on probably a plane that Jeffrey Epstein was flying on at some point. It's time for Let's Argue. Yeah, we're hopping on the internet. We're arguing because that's what time it is. It's time to argue, baby.

"HYPE DENZEL >> INTROSPECTIVE DENZEL.
Don't get me wrong, Zel's great at both, and I love TA1300 and MMESYF, but ZUU and KMOTMS2 is so overlooked plus he flows best on those types of tracks." - @insertwordshere6952

Maybe I'm the wrong person to respond to this take because I famously keep giving Denzel eights. Yeah, it's just one eight after the next. I just can't stop and I apologize. I truly think the best thing about Denzel is his continued evolution and his ability to explore different sounds and vibes and thematic concepts and the fact that all of his projects are so vastly different. It's cool. It's refreshing. It's what's actually made him continue to be relevant long past the point.

Many an artist who who might have had much larger commercial peaks than he did at the start of the 2010s, in the middle of the 2010s, toward the end of the fucking 2010s. I don't think it's really a matter of what version of him is better than another version. Every version of him so far has been great.

Honestly, if you were to erase one version of him in favor of another, I feel like that would just be to his detriment as an artist. It would be a detriment. I don't want to see one version of Denzel without the other version of Denzel. It's the greater context of his abilities and everything that he does and can do that makes him an awesome artist.

"Politics in music is good. Not all music needs to be 'political' but discussing what is happening in the real world is completely natural. Wanting a world without 'political' music is political in and of itself (and also a cowardly desire to retreat into mindless consumerist escapism)" - @sleepinthemorningcalm

Yeah, and another thing that I feel is important about politics in music or just art in general is that it can be motivating and validating. In music and in content broadly, there's this pressure that is placed onto people or that people put on themselves to just be like, 'Oh, I need to have the most original, most new, most fresh, most cutting-edge take on everything.' No, you can just find a different way or even just the same way to say the correct thing or say the right thing or say the most compassionate, most sensible, most common sense thing. You can just say it, and there's value in that.

You don't have to have the perspective or the take that everyone agrees with. You don't have to have a doctorate in political science or social sciences in order to have a perspective on things and to have a valid perspective on things. Of course, the art shouldn't suffer at the hands of the message at the end of the day, but it does suck how many people are afraid to really jump in and say something of substance sometimes.

On the topic of shit as important as, I don't know, human rights, losing a few people that think like, 'No, actually, genocide is pretty cool.' Fuck those people. Who cares if you lose them? They're assholes. What's the value of having freaks like that in the ranks of your audience, honestly?

"Which is worse, hearing someone rhyme a word with itself or being able to predict a rhyme before it happens?" - @zanewurtz8493

I suppose I'm happy to hear both, depending upon the context, when I'm able to complete a rhyme in my own head before it actually happens. I'm not going to lie, sometimes it does happen often, but I feel like that's just as a result of having heard a lot of shit. I feel like if you hear enough things, you can see a lot of things coming. And that doesn't just go for lyrics. That also goes for maybe certain transitions or chord changes and musical ideas that tend to just play very well in a mainstream context with a lot of different genres.

I think at one point, you have to suspend in your head the need for things and for music and for art to be surprising. Just because a piece of art is surprising doesn't mean it's good and a piece of art doesn't need to be surprising in order for it to be quality. If I have to pick between these two, I'll say, rhyming a word with itself. Though, again, there are contexts in which I think that works, where it can be funny or self-aware, or where maybe in addition to that word, you're rhyming other words surrounding that word. I think that's a context where that's a bit more acceptable. So that's my answer to your question. Okay? That's my answer.

"minecraft volume alpha deserves more credit for putting an entire generation onto ambient music" - @benlukomski6787

Yeah, it's really like the Music for Airports of our generation. I think you could I'll probably argue the Minecraft soundtrack had a further spread culturally than Brian Eno's Ambient Works, though. Though I mean, a lot of people have certainly heard his musical contributions to the Windows sound set. Brian Eno in his own way definitely contributed to modern music esthetics or the musical esthetics that are really embedded in our psyches due to the fact that just so many people were exposed to them in a casual context. Casual as you're playing a video game in the background or casual as you're just logging on to your computer to look at some porn.

"Big artists have a moral responsibility to prevent the entertainment industry from ripping off their fans" - @Punk-Mask

I feel like people have to understand that a lot of what goes on as far as the big, gigantic, major ticketing corporations and so on and so forth, this is really shit that is out of the hands of a lot of artists. I mean, if you're as big as The Cure or you're as big as Taylor Swift and shit like that, for sure, you have the ability to leverage certain things and push things in your direction. Honestly, a lot of smaller artists cannot play ball like that. On top of it, a lot of them are getting ripped the fuck off when it comes to actually making money on touring as well.

It's actually one of the biggest crocks of shit that is continually growing in the music industry right now because for a long time, as artists, we're making less and less and less money off of digital sales and streaming and so on and so forth. The argument was always like, 'Oh, well, at least they're making money off touring. At least they're making money off performances.' Now it seems like that's becoming more and more of a difficult thing to do. And now it's only the Taylor Swifts of the industry and the biggest artists of the industry that are really raking in the fucking dough on their giant festival-sized performances. And it's just getting more and more difficult and harder for everybody else.

"Docehii will be on the Mount Rushmore of female rap artist" - @jeremysoriano2496

She has the potential right now to just be on the Mount Rushmore of rap artists. Not female rap artists, just rap artists. She's a good lyricist. She picks some damn good beats sometimes, and she has the capacity for coming together with good concepts and great storytelling, too. It's just a of whether or not that ends up evolving into a quality catalog.

I feel like her new project, Alligator Bites, is really just like, again, it's obviously a mixtape and it's been marketed as such, but it's really like a compilation of all of these various things that she can do and pull off and perform and execute. I'm hoping that she and her team are paying attention to the moments and the tracks off of that project that are doing the best and are being well received the most. The most popular tracks off that record are actually truly the best moments. I hope that she drifts in the direction of the most well-received bits off that record. I think if she does, we'll be in for a really killer rap album come 2025, 2026. Fingers fucking crossed.

"Music discourse on Instagram is absolutely terrible. It seems like I'm talking to people who make listening to one genre of music their entire personality (aka born in the wrong generation kids). And if you slightly disagree with them they call you the same unfunny Jokes (swiftie, you probably listen to Carti, random gif, etc). But if you show any form of enjoyment, you're labeled as a "glazer" which is stupid as hell. Literally the only artists on ig that you can like and not get banished into the shadow realm are Kanye West, Clairo, The Beatles, Radiohead, and for some weird reason, Creed?" - @jarjarl1715

I feel like you've also just simultaneously described music discourse on Twitter, too. And really music discourse on social media at large. Though I do think there are some pockets of YouTube that are a bit odd and niche and specific. And I think that also is the case for some pockets of TikTok, too. I feel like discourse on the internet is getting worse and worse. I've talked about this in many a video, in many a piece of content. If I'm to shorten that opinion or view down to two key reasons.

One, comment sections are curated. It's not just the comments that are just being posted in succession. Comment sections are curated to favor and throw in your face first the posts and the opinions that are either polarizing, extremely disagreeable, or are just like very short and fast and quippy and humorous. Rare is it that anything that is thoughtful or takes a while to digest is rising to the top in the comments, which incentivizes a certain discourse. Algorithms have just been so fucking effective in terms of walling people off into the very specific set of things that they enjoy the most intensely.

As a result, there's no greater shared understanding or appreciation of many things these days. Everybody's just hold off into their own little world. There's not a lot of things that we're all collectively liking and collectively enjoying. So it's easy, again, for people to be getting at each other's throats because there's no greater appreciation for the stuff that other crowds of people are listening to.

"I'm going to eat a hot dog for lunch." - @iitsLeaf

I mean, if you want, I'm not going to stop you. After all, I really can't. But if I was there with you, I would cook for you. I would cook for you something less shitty.

I'm going to leave it there. You guys are the best. Love you.

Anthony Fantano. Let's Argue. Forever.